Sunday, May 04, 2008

Precisely how did "Sex and the City" contribute to "easing [...] thousands of women from the shackling fears of spinsterhood"? If anything, that show gave women of my generation a fear of being 40 and single we would otherwise have never thought to develop. Women my age were not raised to believe we needed to marry to be happy, but one episode of SATC made the point better than a lifetime of nagging would have done.

Once you took away the shoes (which were never much to my liking) and the men (same thing), these women led pretty miserable lives. Their primary interest was talking about men, and this line of discussion is simply no more interesting when the people involved are 35 than when they are 14. One of the benefits of being in a relationship is the fact that you (ideally) spend less time talking about relationships, which, along with talking about weight, is inevitable but should never be the only thing female friends discuss. If the show depicted women who were single and capable of discussing, if even for one moment, something other than the men to whom they were not married... but that never happened. At least not in the episodes I've seen, and my apartment only gets TBS, not HBO. Perhaps in the "unsanitized" episodes Miranda discusses her law-firm work, Charlotte her taste in art, and so on.